Using syslog in rails application

Question

I am thinking of using syslog in my rails applications. I am going to follow instructions mentioned here

In production box I have 4 rails applications running using passenger. If I switch to use syslogger for all 4 of my applications then I am afraid that the log messages from all 4 applications will go to a single file and the log messages will be interleaving. Of course, I can use splunk but first I wanted to check if it was possible for me to get one log file for each of my rails application. That would be desirable for my situation.

Is that possible?

Answer 1

Yes, by default, almost all Unix syslogds will write messages given in the user or local* facility in the same file. However, every syslogd I know will allow you to specify logfiles on a per-facility basis, so you can have your first application log to local1.*, second one to local2.* and so on.

Furthermore, newer syslog daemons like syslog-ng allow for splitting messages to different files by evaluating the message against a regular expression (write log strings which have railsapp_1 in them to /var/log/railsapp_1.log and so on).

So, configure your syslogd appropriately and you are done (the gory details of changing that configuration should be asked on serverfault.com if your system's man pages don't help you doing it.)